Golden Horde

Jochi's share

Drafted from Morgan, The Mongols (2007)formation

Chinggis Khan gave his eldest son the land furthest west — as far, the formula went, as Mongol hooves had reached — which at the time was not very far, and was therefore an inheritance that had to be gone out and taken.

The son whose paternity was in doubt

Jochi's mother Börte had been carried off by the Merkit early in Chinggis's career and recovered some months later, and Jochi was born soon after. The question of whose son he was hung over him all his life; the Secret History records his brother Chagatai throwing it at him in front of their father.

Chinggis never repudiated him. But the inheritance he was given was the far edge, and he died in 1227, a few months before his father, without ever governing much of it.

The ulus passed to his sons — Batu in the west, Orda in the east — and it was Batu who turned a claim on empty steppe into a state.

The great western campaign

The assembly of 1235 resolved on a campaign to the west, and it was resourced as an imperial undertaking rather than a family one: princes from all four branches went, with Subedei, the best soldier the empire produced, in effective command.

What followed in seven years is the most successful sustained campaign in military history and is worth listing plainly. The Volga Bulghars in 1236. The Rus principalities one at a time through 1237 and 1238 — Ryazan, Vladimir, Suzdal — in a winter campaign, because the frozen rivers were roads and the Russian forests were not passable otherwise. Kiev in December 1240. Then a simultaneous advance into Poland and Hungary in the spring of 1241, in which two separate armies destroyed a German-Polish force at Legnica and the Hungarian royal army at Mohi within two days of each other, four hundred kilometres apart.

Two days apart, four hundred kilometres apart, coordinated in advance. That is the thing about the Mongol armies that is hardest to convey and hardest to match: not the cavalry, which many peoples had, but the staff work.

Then they went home

In December 1241 Ögödei died in Mongolia. The princes broke off and rode east for the succession assembly, and Hungary and Poland were never attacked in that way again.

Whether the death is the whole explanation is argued — the Hungarian plain may simply not have carried enough grass for the horse herds, and the armies had been in the field a long way from home for six years. What is not in doubt is that the withdrawal was not forced.

What Batu kept

He did not go back to Mongolia to live. He settled on the lower Volga, built a capital at Sarai, and governed the western steppe and the Rus principalities from it.

He also never took the title of Great Khan, though he was the senior prince of the family and could probably have had it. What he did instead was make khans: his support decided the succession of 1251 in favour of the Toluid line, and for a decade he was the most powerful individual in the empire without holding its highest office.

The state he left behind is usually called the Golden Horde. It called itself the ulus of Jochi, and for two hundred and fifty years the question of who governed Russia was answered on the Volga.

The army that did not stop

Drafted from The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471 (1914)expansion

Batu's campaign of 1236 to 1242 is the most successful winter offensive in military history and one of the least examined, because the people it fell on were in no position to write about it afterwards.

Why winter

Every previous steppe raid on Rus' had come in summer, when horses could graze and armies could move. Sübedei, who had ridden this ground in 1223 and remembered it, brought the army in at the end of the year — and the Novgorod chronicler's dates show why.

Ryazan was invested on 16 December 1237 and fell on the 21st. Vladimir fell in February. The grand prince died on the river Sit in March. Torzhok was invested on the first Sunday in Lent.

The country between the Rus' towns is forest and marsh, impassable to a mounted army for most of the year. In January it is a road. The rivers that defend the towns in summer are highways in winter; the Oka, the Volga, the Kliazma and the Msta all freeze hard enough to carry siege equipment, and every principality is connected to every other by ice.

Nobody had ever attacked Rus' that way because nobody had ever had an army that could live in the open at those temperatures. The Mongols could.

Town by town

The chronicler records a sequence rather than a battle, and the sequence is the argument.

The Ryazan princes went out to meet the envoys rather than let them into the towns, and refused the demand for a tenth of everything. Ryazan was taken in five days and its people killed by fire and by the sword — the prince, the princess, men, women, children, monks, nuns and priests.

At Vladimir the prince fled the city and his son shut himself in it. When the battering rams were set up and the walls were clearly going, the young prince, his mother, his wife, his sister and the bishop were all shorn into the monastic order in the cathedral, and when the city burned they shut themselves into the sacristy. The Mongols broke down the doors, piled wood against the church and set fire to it.

Then Moscow, Pereyaslavl, Yuriev, Dmitrov, Volok and Tver, and then Torzhok, fenced round in the same way as the others.

There is no defeat in the field anywhere in the account, because there was no army in the field. Each town was taken by itself, in order, at a rate of a few days each, by an enemy that never had to fight more than one of them at a time.

The help that did not come

The grand prince of Vladimir was asked for help by Ryazan and neither went himself nor listened to the request, wishing to make war separately.

The chronicler explains this theologically, as God taking away their strength and putting perplexity into them for their sins. The political explanation is in his own text a few lines earlier: Rus' was a dozen principalities whose princes had spent two generations fighting each other for Kiev, and every one of them calculated that the storm would fall on a rival first.

They were all correct, in turn.

Why it stopped

The army went on into Poland and Hungary in 1241, destroyed a Polish and German force at Legnica and the Hungarian army at Mohi within two days of each other, and reached the Adriatic. Then in 1242 it turned round and went home.

Ögödei had died in Mongolia, and the princes of the blood who were with the army — including the future great khans Güyük and Möngke — had to go back for the assembly. That is the entire reason, and it is the clearest illustration in this history of what a Mongol army was: not a migration and not a horde looking for land, but an expeditionary force under orders, which could be recalled.

Europe was not saved by a battle. It was saved by a funeral.

Let us leave these dogs

Drafted from Paris, Matthew Paris's English History, from the Year 1235 to 1273 (1852)expansion

What the Mongol advance looked like from the far end of Europe is preserved by a monk at St Albans who never went further from home than London, and it is a study in how information and panic travel.

The herring

Matthew Paris's first Mongol entry is under 1238, and its most striking detail is economic.

The fishermen of Gotland and Frisia, dreading the Tartars' attacks, did not come to Yarmouth that year at the herring season, where their ships usually loaded. In consequence herrings were considered of no value in England on account of their abundance, and forty or fifty of them, though very good, sold for a single piece of silver — even in places at a great distance from the sea.

An army on the Volga moved the price of fish in the English midlands. It is the earliest clearly recorded case of that kind of transmission, and it is in a chronicle written by a man who had no idea that was what he was recording.

The embassy

The other half of the entry is stranger. Special ambassadors came to the king of France on behalf of the Saracens, and chiefly on behalf of the Old Man of the Mountain — the head of the Nizari Isma'ilis, the Assassins — to say that a monstrous and inhuman race had burst out of the northern mountains and taken the rich lands of the East, and to ask for help.

A second messenger from the same party came on to the king of England, with the argument stated plainly: if we cannot withstand them, nothing remains to prevent their devastating the countries of the West. The chronicler supplies the tag:

For when your neighbour's house doth burn, the fire will seize on yours in turn.

The chief of the Mongol embassies, the envoys reported, had declared that he was the messenger of God on high, sent to subdue the nations who rebelled against him.

The answer

The bishop of Winchester was present, wearing the crusader's cross, and interrupted the speech to reply — jocosely, the chronicler notes:

Let us leave these dogs to devour one another, that they may all be consumed, and perish; and we, when we proceed against the enemies of Christ who remain, will slay them, and cleanse the face of the earth, so that all the world will be subject to the one Catholic church, and there will be one shepherd and one fold.

Peter des Roches died a few months later, which spared him finding out how the proposal worked in practice. Within four years the Mongols had destroyed the armies of Poland and Hungary and reached the Adriatic, and it was the death of a khan in Mongolia rather than any Christian army that turned them round.

What Europe thought it was fighting

Paris's 1240 entry shows how little anyone knew and how hard they worked at it.

They burst out of mountain-bound regions, he says, like demons loosed from Tartarus, so that they are well called Tartars, as it were inhabitants of Tartarus — a false etymology from a real fear, and the reason a Mongol is called a Tatar in most European languages to this day. Elsewhere he offers a second guess: that they are named from a river called Tartar that runs through their mountains.

Then the description, which mixes observation with nightmare in a way that is worth keeping intact. Short and thickset, compact and very strong; invincible in battle and indefatigable in labour; wearing armour on the front of the body and none on the back — a detail he repeats twice, and explains as being so that they may not take to flight. Excellent archers. Swords with one edge. Boats made of ox-hides, ten or twelve men to one, in which they cross the largest rivers without delay or trouble. Horses so short in the leg that they are mounted in three steps instead of with stirrups, and which eat leaves and even the trees themselves. They bring their herds and their wives, who are brought up to war the same as the men.

And then: that they drink blood from their flocks and consider it a delicacy; that they eat dogs and human beings; that they know no other language than their own and no other nation knows it.

The last point is the true one and explains the rest.

For never till this time has there been any mode of access to them, nor have they themselves come forth, so as to allow any knowledge of their customs or persons to be gained through common intercourse with other men.

Europe had no information at all. Within eight years it sent a friar to find out, and he came back with the Great Khan's seal and the demand that the Pope come in person and submit.

One tenth of everything

Drafted from The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471 (1914)expansion

The Golden Horde was founded on a campaign that took two winters. The fullest Russian account of the first of them was kept in the one large city that was not taken, and it opens with a demand.

The terms

In the winter of 1237 the chronicle of Novgorod records that foreigners called Tartars came in countless numbers, like locusts, into the land of Ryazan, halted at a river, and sent their emissaries to the princes: a sorceress and two men with her.

demanding from them one-tenth of everything: of men and Knyazes and horses — of everything one-tenth.

The princes of Ryazan, Murom and Pronsk would not let the envoys into their towns. They came out to meet them, and answered:

Only when none of us remain then all will be yours.

That is the whole negotiation. A tithe of the population, the horses and the ruling family, demanded in advance of any fighting, by three people, of whom the one the chronicler names first is a woman he calls a sorceress.

What the Russians did about it

The chronicle is as hard on its own side as on the invaders.

Ryazan sent to Yuri of Vladimir for help, or for him to come himself. But Yuri neither went himself nor listened to the request of the Knyazes of Ryazan, but he himself wished to make war separately. When a relief force did reach the Ryazanians at Kolomna it was surrounded and driven against its own ramparts, and the commanders were killed; and of the contingent from a town that was not yet important, the chronicler records only that the men of Moscow ran away having seen nothing.

The method is described the same way at every town: the Tartars came, fenced it all round with a fence, and brought up battering rams. Ryazan was invested on 16 December and taken on the 21st. The bishop escaped because he had left at the moment the troops closed on the town; everybody else, the chronicle says — prince, princess, men, women, children, monks, nuns and priests — was killed by fire or by the sword.

At Vladimir the prince's son, his mother, the bishop and the whole province shut themselves in. When they saw in the morning that the town must fall, the bishop tonsured them all — the prince, the princess, their daughter and daughter-in-law, and the good men and women — into the monastic order inside the cathedral. Then the rams came up, the town was fired, and the family took refuge in the sacristy; the Mongols broke the doors, piled wood against the church and burned it with everyone inside.

Torzhok, ninety miles from Novgorod, was fenced round in the same way and held out under the rams for two weeks. And the people in the town were exhausted and from Novgorod there was no help for them. It fell on 5 March and everyone in it was killed.

Why the chronicle exists to say so

Novgorod was not taken. The Mongols turned back short of it — the traditional explanation is the spring thaw and the marshes — and the city subsequently submitted, paid, and was counted in the census of 1257 like everywhere else.

So the chronicle that gives the best surviving Russian account of the conquest was written in the one place that experienced it as a tribute assessment rather than as a massacre, by clergy whose framework is that this was punishment for sin: thus also did God before these men take from us our strength and put into us perplexity and thunder and dread and trembling for our sins.

That framework is worth taking seriously rather than deducting. A chronicler who believes the invasion is a judgement has no motive to conceal how badly his own princes behaved, and this one does not. The refusal of Vladimir to help Ryazan, the flight of the Moscow men, the absence of relief for Torzhok — the failures are all on the Russian side of the page, recorded by a Russian, because in his scheme they are the evidence of what the judgement was for.

What the demand established

The tithe was not a war aim invented for Ryazan. It was the standard Mongol requirement of submission everywhere, and refusing it is what made a town an enemy rather than a subject.

Two decades later the Horde got its tenth anyway, by census, from a Rus that had stopped fighting — counted household by household by officials who came north with an escort, and collected through princes who found it easier to gather the money themselves than to have the tax farmers do it. The princes who did that best were the ones in the town whose men had run away having seen nothing.

The frozen river

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division I (1880)peak

In 1262 a Mongol army crossed the frozen Terek to attack another Mongol army, and the Golden Horde went to war with its own cousins in Iran on the side of the Muslim power that had beaten them both.

Berke

Batu's brother Berke was a Muslim, and had been one for a long time. Rubruck, passing through the Kipchak in 1253, was told that he would not allow anyone at his camp to eat pork. He was the first Chinggisid ruler of a major khanate to convert, and he did it while his cousin Hülegü was on his way to Baghdad.

The quarrel had three causes and Howorth lists them in order. Hülegü had executed princes of the Jochid line serving in his army. The great khan had patronised him pointedly over Berke's head. And Berke claimed Arran and Azerbaijan — the winter pasture south of Derbend that the Horde's armies had been using — which Möngke had assigned to Hülegü.

The sack of Baghdad and the killing of the caliph, by a Buddhist cousin, gave the grievance a shape.

The scattering

When the tension became obvious, the Golden Horde contingents serving in Hülegü's army understood what was coming and ran.

One body got back to the Kipchak through the Derbend pass. A second, under two generals, went east across Khurasan with Hülegü's troops behind them and seized Ghazni. A third — two hundred men — rode into Syria and threw themselves on the mercy of the sultan of Egypt.

Baybars ordered them well treated and supplied with barley and grain, robes of honour and sugar. He went out of Cairo in person to meet them, quartered them outside the city, gave them horses, persuaded them to accept Islam, made their chiefs emirs and enrolled the rest among the Mamluks.

Then he questioned them about their country, and sent an embassy to Berke.

Who Baybars was

The answer to that question is the most important fact about the Golden Horde's economy, and it takes one paragraph of Howorth to state.

The Mamluks were a corps of slave soldiers, young Turks bought chiefly out of the Kipchak steppe, founded by Saladin and given pre-eminence for their loyalty. When the Mongols overran the Kipchak, a great number of young Turkish captives were sold and the corps was enormously enlarged. Its chiefs had by then become sultans of Egypt.

Baybars was a Kipchak Turk of the Borlu tribe. He had been sold by the Mongols to the Venetians, resold at Sivas to an Ayyubid sultan, put in the guard, and given the title Bunduqdari. He advised the killing of Hülegü's envoy in July 1260, defeated Hülegü's general Kitbuqa at Ain Jalut in September and recovered Syria, murdered his own sultan on the way home when refused the government of Aleppo, and made himself sultan. Under his patronage a surviving Abbasid was set up as caliph in Cairo.

So: the Mongol conquest of the Kipchak enslaved the population of the Kipchak; the slaves were shipped to Egypt through the Black Sea ports; they became the army of Egypt; that army stopped the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut; and its commander then allied with the khan of the people who had enslaved him against the Mongols of Iran.

The letter Baybars sent to Berke assured him of his friendship, urged him to fight Hülegü, listed his own troops of Turks, Kurds and Arabs, enumerated the Muslim and Frankish princes who were his vassals, and told him about the fugitives who had arrived saying that he was their master. He sent with it a certified genealogy of the caliph he was about to install.

The crossing

Berke sent thirty thousand men under Nogai. The Persian historian Wassaf described the advance, and Howorth quotes him:

In the winter of 662, when the almighty goldsmith covered the river of Derbend with plates of silver, and the furrier of the winter had clad the hills and heaths with ermine. The river being frozen hard as stone to the depth of a spear's length, an army of Mongols went forth at the command of Berke Oghul, filthy as ghuls and devils of the wilderness, and as numerous as the rain drops, their waves rolled over the frozen river with the speed of the wind and of fire. The rattling of their waggons and horses' hoofs was like thunder and lightning.

That is a court historian of the Ilkhans describing his master's cousins as devils. Two branches of one family, fifty-six years after Chinggis was proclaimed on the Onon, at war over a province and a religion.

What it settled

The Caucasus war ran, on and off, for sixty years and neither side won it. What it settled was the Horde's orientation.

It made the Golden Horde a Muslim power with a permanent alliance with Cairo, a permanent enemy in Tabriz, and a commercial interest in keeping the Black Sea slave route open — which is why the Genoese were allowed to sit at Caffa, and why the Horde's foreign policy for two centuries was conducted with the Mediterranean rather than with Mongolia.

It also meant that Hülegü's Ilkhanate, hemmed in by Berke to the north and Baybars to the south, never expanded again.

Ruling without occupying

Drafted from Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (1985)peak

Batu's campaign destroyed the Rus principalities between 1237 and 1240 and took Kiev. What followed was not occupation. The Mongols withdrew to the steppe, kept their capital at Sarai on the lower Volga, and governed the Russian lands through the existing princes — who travelled to Sarai for a yarlyk, a patent confirming their right to rule, and who collected and remitted the tribute themselves.

It is the same arrangement, arrived at independently, that the Abbasids ended up with in the east: authority exercised through local rulers who kept their positions by acknowledging a distant overlord. The difference is that the Horde could enforce it, and did, with punitive expeditions for two centuries.

The system had a beneficiary the Mongols did not intend. Moscow was an insignificant town in 1240; its princes made themselves the Horde's preferred tax collectors for the whole of north-eastern Rus, used the position to absorb their rivals, and eventually stopped remitting. That the state which became Russia was assembled inside a Mongol administrative arrangement is Halperin's central point, and it complicates the national historiography considerably.

The census

The instrument that made it work was counting people, and the Rus' had never been counted before.

Mongol officials — the chislenniki, the numberers — went through the principalities household by household in the 1250s, registering everyone liable. It was the same apparatus applied in China and in Iran, run by the same central administration, and it produced a tax that was assessed on heads rather than negotiated with princes. Novgorod resisted it and was made to submit. The count established who owed what, and it did not have to be repeated often.

Collection was first farmed to Muslim merchants out of Bukhara and Khwarazm, backed by baskaks — resident agents with troops. That arrangement produced the risings of 1262, in which several towns killed the tax farmers, and the Horde drew the correct conclusion: it was cheaper to let the princes collect.

What that bought and what it cost

For the Horde, everything in the short run. No garrisons in the forest, no administration to pay for, no need to keep an army in a country where an army could not feed itself, and a tribute that arrived on time because the man collecting it had to answer for the shortfall in person at Sarai.

For the princes, a machine. A prince with the collection rights held other principalities' money, could compel payment with the Horde's authority behind him, and could keep the margin. He also acquired the census, the assessment lists, the idea of a tax that was not negotiated, and the habit of an administration that worked without consulting the people it worked on.

Every one of those things was still in use in Moscow four centuries later.

Why the Horde stayed on the steppe

Not from lack of ambition. Because the grass stops.

The Volga and the Don steppe feeds horses. North of the forest line it does not, and an army that lives on its herds cannot be quartered in Suzdalia through a winter. The Mongols understood the limit exactly: they took the whole Kipchak steppe as far as the Danube and settled in it, and treated the forest zone as a tributary they visited.

The same logic governed everywhere the Mongols went. Where there was pasture they stayed and ruled directly. Where there was not, they ruled through whoever was already there. It is the reason the Horde outlasted the Ilkhanate by a century and a half, and it is also the reason it lost.

Hülegü's people went into Iran, took the cities and the revenue, became Persian and Muslim, and were gone in eighty years. Jochi's people stayed in the grass, kept the army and the language and the mobility, and stayed nomads — and a state that never took over the administration of its richest subject province gave that province a hundred and fifty years to learn how to run one.

Uzbeg

The Horde adopted Islam formally under Uzbeg in the 1310s, and became one of the great Muslim powers — which changed its diplomacy, its script and its law, and did not change its relationship to Rus' at all. Uzbeg went on issuing patents, and the metropolitan of the Russian church went on being exempted from tribute by them.

The Horde broke up in the fifteenth century into the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and the Crimea, which the state its own tax system had assembled then took one at a time.

What Moscow learned

Drafted from Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (1985)aside?What aside means

The Horde governed the Rus principalities by issuing each prince a yarlyk, a patent to rule, and requiring tribute. Which prince received which patent was the Horde's decision, and the princes competed for it — travelling to Sarai, petitioning, denouncing rivals, and occasionally being executed there.

Moscow won that competition. Its princes obtained the right to collect the tribute for the whole of north-eastern Rus, which meant they handled other principalities' money, could enforce payment, and could keep a margin. They also obtained the grand-princely title and, in 1325, persuaded the metropolitan of the Russian church to move his seat there. A minor town on a minor river became the centre of the region inside a century, using authority delegated by an overlord.

Halperin's argument is that Russian historiography has systematically understated this, preferring a narrative of unbroken resistance to a foreign yoke, when the formative period of the Muscovite state was spent as the Horde's most effective collaborator, learning administration, taxation and the census from it.

The pattern is a familiar one. The Samanids, Tahirids and Ghaznavids all accumulated the substance of independence while holding a formal grant from a distant overlord, and none of them declared independence either. What differs here is only that the overlord was not Muslim and the eventual successor state wrote a history in which the arrangement was purely an oppression.

The moving city

Drafted from Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (1829)peak

In 1332 Ibn Battuta reached the camp of Uzbeg Khan on the steppe and found that it was a city and that it was travelling.

Here we witnessed a moving city, with its streets, mosques, and cooking-houses, the smoke of which ascended as they moved along. When, however, they halted, all these became stationary.

He is describing the ordu — the khan's household in motion, with the whole apparatus of a capital carried on wagons: the tents of the wives, the markets, the mosques, the kitchens, the administration. That is what the Golden Horde was. Sarai on the Volga was a real city with a mint and quarters for foreign merchants, but the government was wherever the khan happened to be, and the khan moved with the seasons.

Where the khan sat

Ibn Battuta's account of the Friday audience is the fullest description anyone left of a Chinggisid court in the fourteenth century, and it turns on something that astonished him.

Uzbeg sat after the Friday prayer under an ornamented pavilion he calls the golden alcove, on a throne plated with gilded silver and set with jewels. And his four wives sat on the throne with him.

Whenever one of these wives enters, he arises, and taking her by the hand, puts her into her place upon the throne. Thus they are exposed to the sight of all, without so much as a veil.

Beneath the throne stood his two sons, one on each side; in front of him sat his daughter. Then the great emirs on chairs to right and left, the princes of the house standing before the king, the sons of the emirs by the door, and the army officers behind them; and everyone else entering by rank, saluting, and sitting down at a distance.

For a Maghribi jurist who had spent his life in courts where royal women were not seen, a khan rising to take his wife by the hand and seat her beside him in public was the single most remarkable thing in the Kipchak steppe, and he says so repeatedly. The wives of this King are highly honoured, he writes, and each has her own establishment, and when the sultan wishes to visit one of them he sends word first and preparation is made.

One of the seven

Ibn Battuta places Uzbeg in a list, and the list is worth having because it is how a well-travelled Muslim of the 1330s ranked the world.

The seven great kings: the sultan of the West, the sultan of Egypt and Syria, the sultan of the two Iraqs, Uzbeg of the Turks, the sultan of Turkestan and Transoxiana, the sultan of India, and the sultan of China.

Four of those seven were Chinggisid or ruled a Chinggisid successor state. The Golden Horde is in the list on its own account, not as a remnant of something.

What the state ran on

Three things, and Ibn Battuta touches all of them.

Islam: Uzbeg's reign is when the khanate becomes definitively Muslim, and the traveller is received precisely because he is a Maliki scholar and had already paid his respects to each of the khan's wives.

Trade: the Genoese and Venetian colonies on the Black Sea coast — he passes through Kaffa, and notes that most of its inhabitants are Christians under the khan's authority — bought slaves, grain, furs and wax out of the steppe and the northern forests and shipped them to the Mediterranean. A great many of the Mamluks who ruled Egypt came out of this trade.

And the Rus. He does not go there and the omission is itself informative: the Russian principalities were a source of revenue administered at arm's length, and there was no reason for a khan's guest to visit them.

The journey he was refused and then allowed

One of Uzbeg's wives was a daughter of the emperor of Constantinople, and in 1334 she was pregnant and asked leave to visit her father, intending to leave the child there and return.

Ibn Battuta asked to go with her. He was refused — the khan had some fears respecting him — and got the permission by flattery, promising he would never appear before her except as the khan's servant and guest.

So a Moroccan jurist travelled from a Mongol camp on the Volga to Constantinople in the train of a Byzantine princess who was one of a Muslim khan's four wives, was presented to her father, and came back.

That single journey is the Golden Horde at its height: a state that could put a Greek princess, a Berber scholar and a Turkic khan in the same sentence without anybody finding the combination remarkable.

The great troubles

Drafted from Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (1985)contraction

The Russian chronicles have a name for what happened to the Golden Horde after 1359: the velikaya zamyatnya, the great troubles. In twenty years there were something over twenty khans.

What broke

Uzbeg's son Janibek was murdered by his own son in 1357, and that son was murdered two years later. After that the throne was decided by whichever non-Chinggisid strongman could produce a Chinggisid to put on it, and the strongest of them was Mamai — a commander who was not of the line and therefore could not take the title himself.

The Black Death had gone through the steppe and the cities in the late 1340s, arriving in the west, by the best-known account, from the Genoese colony at Kaffa. Sarai's population and the trade that fed it were both cut.

And the Rus principalities, which had spent a century learning that the khan's authority was real and unarguable, watched twenty khans in twenty years.

Kulikovo

In 1380 Dmitry of Moscow met Mamai's army on the Kulikovo field near the Don and beat it.

Russian tradition has treated that battle as the beginning of liberation ever since, and it is worth being careful about what it actually settled. Dmitry beat Mamai, a usurper's general who had no right to the throne. Two years later Tokhtamysh — a genuine Chinggisid, backed by Timur — took the Horde, marched on Moscow, took the city by a trick, burned it and massacred the population, and Dmitry resumed paying tribute.

So Kulikovo did not end the tribute and was not meant to. What it demonstrated was narrower and, in the long run, more corrosive: that a Russian army could beat a Horde army in the field.

Timur

Tokhtamysh then made the mistake of attacking the man who had put him there.

Timur invaded in 1391 and again in 1395, beat him twice, and on the second occasion did what no Rus prince had ever attempted: he went up the Volga and destroyed the Horde's own cities. Sarai, Astrakhan, Tana and the towns of the lower Volga were sacked, and the trade route that ran from the Black Sea through the steppe to Central Asia was broken.

The khanate never recovered its economy. A state whose revenue came from transit and tribute lost the transit permanently, in two campaigns, at the hands of a fellow Muslim who was not even trying to conquer it.

The pieces

What was left came apart over the next sixty years into successor khanates, each under its own Jochid line: Kazan on the middle Volga in the 1430s, the Crimea in the 1440s, Astrakhan at the mouth of the river, the Kazakhs and the Uzbeks in the east, and the Great Horde in the middle claiming to be the original.

In 1480 Ivan III of Moscow and Akhmat of the Great Horde brought their armies to opposite banks of the Ugra river, faced each other for several weeks, and both withdrew without a battle. Russian historiography calls it the end of the yoke.

In 1502 the Crimean khan destroyed the Great Horde, and the state that had governed Russia from the Volga stopped existing — extinguished by another Chinggisid, not by the people it had governed.

What the troubles actually were

Twenty-five khans in twenty years, on a throne that had had nine in the previous hundred and thirty.

The Horde had inherited the Mongol succession problem in its purest form. There was no rule of primogeniture, no fixed capital in which a claimant had to be installed, and no institution that could decide between two men with armies. What had held it together instead was the khan's control of what came through the cities — the Rus' tribute, the customs, the mint — and once two claimants could each hold a piece of that, there was nothing to arbitrate between them.

Mamai, who fought at Kulikovo, was not a khan and could not be one: he was a commander of the Kiyat, ruling through Chinggisid figureheads, in the same position Edigü would occupy a generation later and Timur occupied at the other end of the steppe. When the real business of the Horde is being done by men who cannot hold the title, the title has stopped being the thing that matters.

Kulikovo, and what it was not

Dmitri of Moscow beat Mamai's army on the upper Don in 1380, and Russian historiography has carried the battle ever since as the beginning of liberation.

What happened next is the reason to be careful with it. Toqtamish — a legitimate Chinggisid, backed by Timur — destroyed Mamai within months, reunited the Horde, came north in 1382, took Moscow by a trick and burned it, and restored the tribute. Dmitri, who had beaten the Horde's army two years earlier, sent his son to Sarai as a hostage and went on paying.

Kulikovo did not end the tribute. It demonstrated that a Rus' army could beat a Horde army in the field, which nobody had known, and it was won against a usurper rather than against the khan. Both of those facts mattered enormously and neither of them is independence.

The year the cities died

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division I (1880)end

The Golden Horde was not destroyed by Moscow. It was destroyed by another Chinggisid claimant's patron, in two campaigns, and what he destroyed was not its army but its towns.

The quarrel

Toqtamish had been put on the throne of the Horde with Timur's help, reunited the two halves of it, and in 1382 burned Moscow and restored the tribute that Kulikovo had been supposed to end. Then he turned on the man who had made him, and invaded Transoxiana and Azerbaijan, and while Timur was away in Persia his people destroyed one of Timur's own cities.

Timur beat him in the field in 1391. Toqtamish came back. Timur beat him again in 1395 on the Terek, and this time went on into the Horde's country in winter and did what he had done in Persia and India.

Astrakhan

The Volga washed the walls of the town, and the inhabitants had a winter custom: they piled masses of ice around it and poured water over them until they had a rampart of ice with a gate cut through it.

The governor came out submissively when Timur approached, and was arrested and sent towards Sarai. Timur entered, ordered the inhabitants, the cattle and the property brought out, and destroyed the place. The governor, on orders, was forced under the ice of the Volga by his escort.

Sarai

From Astrakhan he went on to Sarai, the residence of the khans of the Kipchak.

There also the inhabitants were driven out like sheep, and the town destroyed.

Howorth gives the motive, from Timur's own court historian: revenge for the destruction of a Chagatai capital that the people of the Kipchak had levelled while Timur was campaigning in Persia.

The campaign nearly destroyed the army that carried it out. The winter and the hardness of the march killed most of the horses; a pound of millet sold for seventy dinars, a cow's head for a hundred, a sheep's head for two hundred and fifty. Timur ordered the spoil of Astrakhan and Sarai divided among the troops so that every man could be remounted, and went home by Derbend.

Why it was fatal

Because the Horde was not only a horde.

Sarai, New Sarai, Saraychiq, Azaq, Bulghar, Astrakhan and the Crimean towns were real cities with mints — Howorth works from their coins — and they were where the Horde's wealth was realised. The tribute of Rus' came down the rivers to them. The caravan trade from Khwarazm and China arrived at them. The Genoese and Venetians bought slaves and bought grain at their ports and paid customs on it. The khan's authority over his own princes was underwritten by his ability to distribute what came through them.

A nomad army that loses a battle rides away and re-forms; that had happened to this one before. A nomad state that loses its cities loses its treasury, its mint, its customs and its reason for anybody to obey the khan, and there is no riding away from that.

After 1395 the Horde never again had a ruler who could command all of it. The Crimea broke away in the 1440s, Kazan in the 1430s, Astrakhan in the 1460s, and the rump was finished by the Crimeans in 1502 — and a Russian tributary that had been sending silver to Sarai for a century and a half stopped sending it, and started taking the pieces one at a time.

What Moscow inherited

Drafted from Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (1985)afterlife

The Golden Horde's most significant heir is the state that eventually conquered its successors, and the inheritance is uncomfortable enough that Russian writing spent four centuries denying it.

The yoke

The phrase "the Tatar yoke" is not medieval. It appears in Polish and then Russian writing much later, and it carries an argument: that the Mongol period was an interruption, an external oppression suffered by a Russia that was otherwise continuous with Kiev and with Europe.

There is a competing case, and Halperin's is the sharpest version of it. Moscow rose because the Horde raised it: the grand-princely patent, the yarlyk, was the khan's to give, and from the 1320s he mostly gave it to Moscow, which then collected the tribute of the other principalities on his behalf and kept a cut. A century of doing that made a minor town into the fiscal centre of Russia.

The methods came with the job. The census and the tax registers were Mongol practice; the postal relay system the Muscovite state ran was the yam; a good deal of the vocabulary of money, customs and horses in Russian is Turkic. And the political style — an autocracy in which the ruler is not one lord among others but a sovereign of a different kind — is a great deal closer to Sarai than to anything in Kievan Rus.

Why it was denied

Because of what a national history is for. A church-led tradition that had survived the period by making terms with a pagan and then Muslim overlord had every reason to describe the whole thing afterwards as a punishment for sin and a foreign imposition, and no reason at all to describe it as an education.

That framing then hardened into something else. By the nineteenth century the Mongol period was being used to explain everything about Russia that European observers found backward, and by Russians to explain why they had been kept out of the Renaissance while shielding Europe from the steppe.

Both versions are arguments about identity in the writers' own present. The thing being argued over is a two-hundred-and-fifty-year administrative relationship that nobody involved at the time described in either set of terms.

The last khanates

The practical afterlife runs the other way and takes three hundred years.

Ivan IV took Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, which opened the whole Volga to Moscow and made Russia a multi-confessional empire with a large Muslim population — the condition it has been in ever since.

The Crimean khanate lasted much longer, under an Ottoman protectorate, raiding into Russian and Polish territory for slaves on a scale that depopulated the southern frontier; a Crimean army burned Moscow in 1571. Russia went on making payments to the Crimea into the eighteenth century, which is to say that something recognisably descended from the tribute was still being paid four hundred years after Batu.

Catherine II annexed the Crimea in 1783.

That is the last Chinggisid state anywhere. Five hundred and seventy-seven years after the assembly on the Onon, a descendant of Jochi lost his throne to a German-born empress of Russia, and the arrangement that had begun with a winter campaign across the frozen rivers ended in a treaty.